Emerica’s Wild In The Streets

“Wild In the Streets is the best skateboarding event I’ve ever been to. It’s real.” – Andrew Reynolds

Enough said. “The Boss” supports this so you know it’s going to be cool. Beside, what else is better than a movement. Go out there and be like Gandi or Che and let your voice be heard!

Here’s what Emerica had to say on the event’s website:

About the Event

The goal of Wild in the Streets is to build community and raise awareness of skateboarding and the needs of skateboarders. It is our hope that Wild in the Streets will someday take on the character of a large-scale, decentralized grassroots movement for the benefit of skateboarders everywhere. Emerica believes in the ability of skateboarders to empower themselves to do great things. Be a part of something amazing, or better yet, create your own amazing event.

Taking its cues from a diverse history of “organized coincidences” and happenings such as motorcycle rallies, Reclaim the Streets festivals, and Critical Mass bicycle rides, Emerica’s Wild in the Streets is an unconventional skateboarding event born on the streets of New York City in 2004, and continued in Philadelphia in 2005 and Chicago in 2006. Pedestrian jaws dropped at the sight of hundreds of skateboarders invading these downtown districts en masse. The premise was simple: meet up with the Emerica team at a local skate shop and go street skating, literally, throughout the cities, eventually ending up at a block party barbecue, where the skating continued.

In Philadelphia, one of the stops was a protest at LOVE Park, to raise awareness, in conjunction with the Skateboard Advocacy Network, for the plight of skateboarders in that city. In Chicago in 2006, 3500 skaters pushed from Buckingham Fountain, after a group photo and a massive thank you to the Mayor of Chicago for supporting skateboarding, all the way to Wilson Park, a hefty six miles through downtown and up the Lake Shore Path, in the biggest skateboarding demonstration ever.

In 2007, the Emerica team is mixing things up a little, moving the Wild in the Streets to July 4, Independence Day, in one of the greatest skate cities in the world, San Francisco, to celebrate freedom doing the thing they love the most: skateboarding.

Wild in the Streets: a Manifesto

Wild in the Streets is the attempt to gather skateboarders of every age, color and creed to converge on city streets around the globe in the celebration of pure skateboarding.

We declare that skateboarding is no longer a spectator sport. We believe in demolishing the invisible barriers that separate pro skaters from the rest of us. Wild in the Streets is comprised of all equal participants.

We also contend that conventional organized skateboarding competitions and events are, in effect, a misrepresentation of skateboarding, safely and conveniently re-packaged for mainstream corporate consumption. Wild in the Streets is about challenging conformity.

And we acknowledge that the very society that has marginalized us as skateboarders is now formally engaged in the penetration and misappropriation of our original and distinct skate culture. They, in turn, feed it back to us as more mind-polluting product propaganda. Wild in the Streets is about reclaiming ownership.

Wild in the Streets asserts that the pure essence of skateboarding is in the ability of skateboarders to successfully reinterpret their existing environments to create fun. We are about taking skateboarding back to where it was born ? in the streets.

Together, we can defy convention and reject skateboarding’s image factories and the trends marketers use to divide and categorize us based off the length of our hair, or the cut of our pants. Wild in the Streets is about transcending these petty, trend-based diversions.

Together, we can be our own representatives to the world and bring awareness to our own collective needs. The spectacle of hundreds of skateboarders converging on city streets around the globe has an impact that cannot be denied. Wild in the Streets is about doing it ourselves.

But Wild in the Streets does not seek to gather to solve the world’s problems. We know we couldn’t, even if we tried. The primary purpose of Wild in the Streets is pure and simple: fun. This is, and always will be, first and foremost, for this is skateboarding.